In the kitchen at work, there’s a table where people usually leave cookies, snacks, or homemade baked goods to share with the rest of the company. For the last two days, though, a toaster’s been sitting there. If Friday is Donut Day, will Monday become Toaster Day?

Friday night Huyen and I went to the State Theatre in Falls Church for a great night of reggae with Tru Mystic and The Easy Star Dub All-Stars performing Dub Side of the Moon as The Wizard of Oz showed on the screen behind them. I got backstage for a bit and shot some video for Easy Star throughout the night. We didn’t get home until quite late, but the good show was worth it.

Sunday morning was the Poplar Spring Animal Sanctuary 5k Run for the Animals. It was my first 5k and I’m pleased with how it went. I finished at about 27:16, which certainly isn’t breaking any speed records at an 8:48/mile pace but is better than the pace I was training at for the last few months. The course was a little hillier than I expected, but it didn’t slow me up too much. The official results aren’t out yet, but out of the 143 finishers, I’m expecting to be somewhere around 50 or 60. I posted photos from the event, so have a looksee.

In other news, things continue to be “interesting” at work and I just ran out of bandwidth for May on laze.net (I quickly upped it to a number that should get me through the month).

Update:Results from the run have been posted. I finished at 27:17, placing 31st out of 73 males and 42nd out of 142 overall. I’ll take that.

For those of you in the Northern VA/MD/DC area, the Easy Star All-Stars are coming to the State Theatre in Falls Church on Friday night to perform Dub Side of the Moon (their incredible reggae tribute to Pink Floyd’s stoner classic). To add to the fun, they’ll be screening The Wizard of Oz as they play live. If you’re going, give me a shout, as I will certainly be in attendance.

(Quick history: I’ve been an Easy Star fanatic since day one and have even slept on their couch during a visit to New York. They’re a great bunch of guys who play some kick ass reggae the way it was meant to be played. You can read my review of the album and my recap of an earlier performance complete with an embarrassing story about how I ruined their opening number. Also check out MP3s from the show.)

I SHIT YOU NOT. JOSH LYMAN GAVE ME M&MS. Honestly, I wanted to shove them in my pocket, melting-be-damned, so I could save them and have them framed, but I just stuffed them in my mouth all at once and probably grinned with my teeth full of chocolate candy shell as I thanked him.

I’ve gotta say that while the new features are intriguing, I’m not very psyched about their new licensing options, even with Mena’s reasonable explanation. As a long-time supporter of Movable Type, what I’ve appreciated most is how Ben and Mena were very close with their users. I remember sending Ben an e-mail about Movable Type a few years back, asking him whether he thought it would be a good answer for the UA Journal. I got a personal response. A few months ago, I wrote to Six Apart to ask a simple question about corporate licensing and never got a response. Things have changed.

And to a point, I understand. Six Apart exists to make money, to spread blogging into the corporate environment, and to support personal publishing, probably in that order. But I can’t help but feel that they’ve really gotten it wrong with their new licensing scheme. Perhaps it’s because as it is now, I’m using a registered version of MT (that means I voluntarily donated back in the day) to maintain a total of 11 different blogs. I can do so freely, set up more copies, and publish to as many other blogs as I wish. Under the new pricing structure, there’s not even a pricing structure that would support me. The closest (which supports ten blogs) is $150. $150. That’s a lot of money.

There’s been a lot of negative feedback thusfar about the pricing scheme and people discussing jumping ship to other blogging tools. WordPress or Text Pattern, perhaps? It should be noted that a free, unsupported of Movable Type will continue to exist, with a one author, three blog limitation (is that per-installation, I wonder?).

I’m really not sure about what the future of Movable Type and Six Apart is. I’m pretty crappy when it comes to business-related issues (if you saw the tax return for my LLC, you’d agree). All I know is that this marks the official shift away from the cozy little company of two that birthed Movable Type and toward more standard business-centric (versus user-centric) practices. I wish them the best of luck, especially Ben and Mena because they’re both such nice people, but I definitely don’t see myself upgrading to MT 3.0.

So this is kind of funny. This morning I called Miss Utility to inform them we’d be digging (Miss Utility sends people out to mark lines on your property so you know where underground utility lines are located). The number is 1-800-552-7001. The first time I dialed, I accidentally dialed 1-800-522-7001 and got an adult chatline (I was wondering why I needed to be 18 to call!). I supposed if I had asked for “Miss Utility” on that number I would have gotten a much different response than I expected… especially once I started talking about “planting my tree” and “digging holes.”